After hearing about the new CSS based workflow of Dreamweaver 8, which came out yesterday evening, I had high hopes that the rendering engine for CSS and HTML would have been improved. Disappointingly, this wasn’t the case. Why don’t they try using the rendering engines for Firefox, Safari, and even IE. The first two are now completely open for use and the latter would be smart to include even if there is a liscencing fee. mediaRAIN, my employer, uses Macromedia Studio because we specialize in Flash products. However, we do many HTML/PHP projects as well. Dreamweaver has always been a favorite of mine with it’s HTML highlighting, code completion, and easy-to-use interface. I find myself more productive with Dreamweaver than with notepad. However, it would be really nice to use the WYSIWYG (Design View) to see my CSS styling as I create it rather than saving and viewing in the browser. There is no point in a WYSIWYG if what you see isn’t really what you get. To be fair, there are some really nice features with the new edition of Dreamweaver. There is code collapsing (which can collapse a selected section of code as well as an element). They’ve fixed the built in FTP client to work in the background. There is a more usable CSS panel which will show you all the styles applied to the currently selected element, even inherited ones. Their code completion is reworked and is a bit nicer.

And you can turn on and off the underlining of invalid code (which actually doesn’t seem to work). My hope would be, in the future (near future would be nice), that Dreamweaver would add the ability of changing the WYSIWYG rendering engine to one of the three or four major browsers so that you can accuratly see what your CSS looks like in that browser. Either that, or fix their current renderer to properly display floating elements, absolutly positioned elements, and the correct box model.

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4 Responses to “Dreamweaver and CSS Still Don’t Play Nice”

I’m glad someone finally tried it! And so quick too! So the CSS still sucks, what about the PHP syntax color coding? I hate adding new document types (ex. CakePHP .thtml) to the MX version (i.e. configuration hell).

I never liked the syntax highlighting in the old MX Version. Ex.

$category->getRecordByID($id);
….

Anything after the -> MX chocked on it. I guess they didn’t think anyone using Dreamwever would be using objects.

This version of Dreamweaver does have correct highlighting for PHP, and you can also change the colors of the different PHP elements. As far as I can tell, you still have to hack the configuration to add support for different file extensions. I like Zend Studio much better for PHP.

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